A best-selling author tries to restore the reputation of a wronged Jewish scientist who saved millions of lives by creating the world’s first vaccines against the bubonic plague and cholera – only to fall victim to anti-Semitism and almost disappear from history since his arrival disappeared. death in 1930.
In dramas planned for stage and screen, Paul Twivy will pay tribute to the extraordinary achievements of Waldemar Haffkine, a pioneering microbiologist recognized by scientist Joseph Lister as a savior of humanity – but who was brought down by racist doctors within the British . Raj while working in India.
Evidence was falsified in a lawsuit from which he never recovered. He returned to Britain and even after he was acquitted, he was not allowed to resume his former job.
Historian Simon Schama serves as an unofficial consultant on the scripts, having researched Haffkine for his book Foreign Bodies: the Terror of Contagion, the Ingenuity of Science.
He compared the case to that of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the French officer of Alsatian Jewish descent who – just a decade earlier – was accused of espionage on the basis of falsified evidence and false testimony in a case fueled by anti-Semitism.
Schama wrote: “The ‘Haffkine affair’ resembled a Dreyfus medical case, not least because, faced with compelling evidence of a gross miscarriage of justice, the authorities resisted any outright admission of wrongdoing.”
Yet Haffkine was a man who would stop at nothing to save lives, even risking his own life by injecting himself with bubonic plague and cholera to develop his vaccines.
Twivy said: “There is no doubt that without Haffkine we would not have survived pandemics, even though he is not well known. He developed vaccines against two of the greatest killers ever. He is literally the most important scientist in terms of the number of lives he has saved.
“But outside microbiology it is virtually invisible. Many scientists don’t even know his name. He has been eliminated from history.”
Born in Odesa, now in Ukraine, Haffkine was a shy man whose talent brought him to the attention of Louis Pasteur, the French microbiologist, and then to the British government, which sent him to colonial India to fight cholera and the bubonic plague .
He arrived in India in 1893 and tested vaccinations that were rejected by his British colleagues. For example, they could not understand how an intestinal disease could be cured by a subcutaneous injection of a cholera microbe. But when he vaccinated 116 members of an isolated village, the only deaths were among the unvaccinated.
Twivy said: “But a number of doctors within the British Raj were jealous of him and extremely hostile to him because he was Jewish and Russian and not a doctor.”
Their anti-Semitism led them to accuse him of murdering 19 people in the Punjab in 1902, who died of tetanus poisoning after being injected.
Twivy said: “Haffkine had followed meticulous procedures but they decided this was a great way to get rid of him. They accused him of inadequate hygiene procedures.”
He added that the poisoning was caused by an assistant’s failure to sterilize the stopper of a vial he had dropped into the ground: “The anti-Semitic doctors knew that and hid that specific evidence. Tens of millions of Haffkine vaccines were given around the world and there was never a single example of tetanus again, but he was ashamed of evidence that was falsified or suppressed.
“A British Raj court was chaired by three people, all of whom wanted him to fail. We have unearthed all the details of the trial and the falsified evidence. It deserves to be one of the most famous mistrials in history.”
Haffkine died in obscurity in Switzerland, forgotten in the West, while appreciated in India.
Twivy is the co-author of Change the World for a Fiver, which has sold 1.2 million copies worldwide and aims to inspire people to use everyday actions to change the world. He also wrote Be Your Own Politician, in which he called on citizens, government and business to come together.
In his research on Haffkine, he has tried to understand a man who risked his own health for the sake of others: “He injected himself with twice the dose he thought was needed, unsupervised, to test vaccines. He had not an ounce of self-pity or self-respect, despite all the contradictions he faced. Where does one get this power?”
A public reading of the play will take place at JW3 in London on June 10, with Haffkine being played by Ben Caplan, who has performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company and in Call The Midwife.